The terrifyingly relatable horror of the family trauma in 'Hill House'

This post contains spoilers for Season 1 of The Haunting of Hill House.

We all lived in haunted houses. Or, at the very least, every one of us knows the intimate horrors of family, whether in the form of their tormenting absence or the full-bodied specters that still stalk us today.

Each of our haunted houses is also cursed by the eternal love a family promises. Their halls echo with the decay of words left unsaid, or reverberate with the angry ones you can't ever take back. In the walls, you hear the desperate banging of a child who needs to break free of its stifling confines, or a mother trying to keep her locked away and safe inside forever.

The metaphorical meaning behind recent domestic horrors like The Haunting of Hill House and Hereditary aren't hard to read: Family is hell. But actually unlike the traumatic grief in Hereditary, Hill House revels in the more pure and unintentional pain that families can often inflict.

There is no lack of love between the Craines in Hill House. Actually, it is exactly the all-consuming familial love they have for each other that threatens to eat them alive — if they don't learn to grow past it.

Because the domestic horror of Hill House is, if anything, all about learning to let go of the picturesque, ideal dream of a loving household.

You can see this relatable terror in the juxtaposition between eras that defines the series. The idyllic young family in flashbacks are always in stark contrast to the fractured, grown up family that's lived through the hardships of life outside the family unit.

The real conflict of Hill House, both as a series and as a living entity personified by the mansion, is laid out explicitly in the finale.

Each of our haunted houses is cursed by the eternal love a family promises.

The house is not just some unfeeling evil, killing people who enter it with impunity. Nell explains that it's like a living being, wanting to keep every family that passes through it frozen in time and togetherness, staving off the real world outside that will inevitably tear their union.

But what the ghouls and ghosts that haunt Hill House reveal is that, despite these best intentions, there is nothing more inhuman than that kind of stagnation.

There is a reason why families must grow up, splinter, and find out who they are outside each other. And every monster who haunts the kids at Hill House can be seen as a confrontation of this natural progression, which the kids experience as the horror of lost childhood innocence.

The dead kittens might not be ghosts, but they're definitely a loss of innocence

Image: Steve Dietl/Netflix

For example, the Bent-Neck Lady who terrified Nell is ultimately only her future self, warning her of what awaits if she ever returns to the home that could swallow her back up. As an adult addict, Luke is haunted by a tall man in a suit and bowler hat, an embodiment of grown up responsibilities chasing after him no matter what he sticks in his arm to run away from it.

But oddly, the older of the siblings (Steve and Shirley) claim to never see ghosts. Their horrifying experiences in the house are grounded more in its reality, like watching diseased kittens die, or Steve realizing his dad is unsure about their financial future.

The truly grotesque aspect of the decayed souls consumed by Hill House, then, isn't who they are fundamentally, which is little more than confused and well-intentioned people. It's that that they never got the chase to moved on. They remain stuck in the family and domestic sphere, their rotting corpses a walking reminder of what happens to normal people who cannot cope with the real world.

The Crain parents' argument at the end of the series' explicitly spells out this very realistic tug and pull we all experience, between the protection of familial bonds — and the need to get beyond it.

The Red Room is like the womb of the house, rebirthing still-born souls

Image: Steve Dietl/Netflix

Olivia's confused motherly instincts tell her to keep the children locked in the Red Room, safe (i.e., dead), and hidden from the monsters that will get to them if they leave. It's a sentiment many mothers facing an empty nest can sympathize with, in some twisted way.

But Hugh begs his wife to understand how, "Even if they’re broken, or addicted, or joyless or, yes, even if they die, we have to watch it all. Because we’re parents. That’s the deal we make. Whatever that life is, we bear witness."

Despite their instinct to protect, it is the job of parents to push their children into the unknown darkness of life outside the walls of home. And it is the job of a growing child to take those steps into darkness, without resenting their parents for being unable to prepare them for every difficulty that would await them.

To refuse these duties is to become another lost soul, wandering through life only in the shadow of what family truly means.

To refuse these duties is to become another lost soul, who wanders through life only in the shadow of what family truly means.

In her final moments with her siblings, Nell corrects a piece of wisdom that their mother used to tell them. Yes, a house is like a body — but the Red Room is not the heart of Hill House. It is its stomach, digesting the souls who fall prey to the idyllic fantasies that it creates to entrap family members in a waking dream.

The Haunting of Hill House, while maybe occasionally a bit too on-the-nose, is a type of domestic horror we're not used to seeing.

Unlike the familial trauma on display in Hereditary, The Ring, Paranormal Activity, Poltergeist, The Shining, Amityville Horror, Rosemary's Baby, the evil is not from without. The family drama is not caused by a lack of empathy, love, or care. To the contrary, the deadliness of the home has very little malice in it.

The true domestic horror of Hill House lies in how it promises something we all crave: A place of eternal shelter, like a mother's arms. And the real test is being brave enough to face life outside it.

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